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Back in 2007, I decided that the world's foremost expert on gravity deserved the opportunity to experience zero gravity, so I offered professor Stephen Hawking a parabolic flight. He accepted, and we issued a press release. This is when our friends at the FAA—whose unofficial motto is clearly “we're not happy until you're not happy”—reminded us that our operating license permitted us to fly only “able-bodied” passengers, and Hawking, being totally paralyzed and wheelchair bound, did not qualify.

But to hell with Murphy. I decided to fix the problem. First, we had to determine who—in the FAA's mind—decides that someone is able-bodied? Second, if we could get that someone to declare Hawking “able-bodied,” we still had to derisk our moonshot and ensure his
safety.

After wading through lawyers, we determined that only Hawking's personal physicians and perhaps experts from the space-medicine world were qualified to make that call. So after purchasing malpractice insurance policies for a few of these folks, we were able to submit three letters to the FAA stating, without question, that Hawking was fit for a flight.

To address the second challenge, we decided that four physicians and two nurses would accompany him on the trip, then assembled a flying emergency room on board the airplane and flew a lengthy practice flight, training the medical team for everything from a heart attack to broken bones. We also decided (and announced to the public) that we'd fly a single thirty-second parabola, and maybe, if everything went perfectly, a second one.

At least that was the plan. The problem with the plan was Hawking. Not only did he endure that first parabola, he had—as he told me—the best time of his life. So we flew another and another and still he wanted more. In total, we made eight arcs with him aboard. Then, on the heels of this success, we had the amazing opportunity to fly six wheelchair-bound teenagers into zero gravity. These were kids who had never walked a day in their lives, yet they got to soar like Superman on that flight. The moral of the story: Stuff goes wrong. Expect it, learn from it, fix it—that's how remarkable happens.

We're taught that when you are given a choice you have to choose only one option. But why choose? All through graduate school I was told to either go to school or start a company. It was binary or bust. But not for me. In my case, the answer was both and then some. I started three companies while in graduate school. I started eight more before I was forty. Steve Jobs juggled both Apple and Pixar. Elon Musk runs three multibillion-dollar successes: Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and SolarCity. Branson, well, alongside his Virgin Management group, has started
over five hundred companies, including eight billion-dollar companies in eight different industries. This multiple-choice approach—if properly managed—can create tremendous momentum. Ideas cross-pollinate. Networks expand. The whole becomes much bigger than the sum of its parts.

The best predictor of future success is past action. It doesn't matter how small those actions. When I'm interviewing potential employees, I'm always more interested in what they've done than in what they will do. Doing something, doing anything, is always so much more important than just talking about doing it. The ratio of something to nothing is literally infinite. So make a plan. Set subgoals. Get busy. Even if the path is unclear, you'll use what you've learned taking that first step to build toward the next, and the next after that. Results always follow. Charles Lindbergh was correct: “The important thing is to start; to lay a plan, and then follow it step by step no matter how small or large one by itself may seem.”

When I first dreamed up the XPRIZE, I went to all the major aerospace contractors looking for funding. They were dismissive. When the prize was announced, these same experts derided it. It took only eight years for Burt Rutan to prove them wrong. Henry Ford, when asked about his employees, said it best: “None of our men are ‘experts.' We have most unfortunately found it necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert because no one ever considers himself expert if he really knows his job. A man who knows a job sees so much more to be done than he has done, that he is always pressing
forward and never gives an instant of thought to how good and how efficient he is. Thinking always ahead, thinking always of trying to do more, brings a state of mind in which nothing is impossible. The moment one gets into the ‘expert' state of mind a great number of things become impossible.”

1. If anything can go wrong, fix it! (
To hell with Murphy!
)

2. When given a choice—
take both!

3. Multiple projects lead to multiple successes.

4. Start at the top, then work your way up.

5. Do it by the book . . .
but be the author!

6. When forced to compromise, ask for more.

7. If you can't win, change the rules.

8. If you can't change the rules, then ignore them.

9. Perfection is not optional.

10. When faced without a challenge—make one.

11. No simply means begin one level higher.

12. Don't walk when you can run.

13. When in doubt:
THINK!

14. Patience is a virtue, but persistence to the point of success is a blessing.

15. The squeaky wheel gets replaced.

16. The faster you move, the slower time passes, the longer you live.

17. The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself!

18. The ratio of something to nothing is infinite.

19. You get what you incentivize.

20. If you think it is impossible, then it is
for you.

21. An expert is someone who can tell you exactly how something can't be done.

22. The day before something is a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea.

23. If it was easy, it would have been done already.

24. Without a target you'll miss it every time.

25. Fail early, fail often, fail forward!

26. If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.

27. The world's most precious resource is the persistent and passionate human mind.

28. Bureaucracy is an obstacle to be conquered with persistence, confidence, and a bulldozer when necessary.

^*
Laws 12 and 15 by Todd B. Hawley. Law, 17 adopted from Alan Kay, Law 21 adopted from Robert Heinlein, Law 24 by Byron K. Lichtenberg, Law 25 adopted from John Maxwell.

In the past five chapters, we've been examining ways to raise your game. Exponential technologies added physical leverage, psychological tools provided a mental edge, and the combination allows entrepreneurs to become true forces for disruption. This chapter, which marks the end of that psychological exploration, focuses on the mind hacks of four remarkable men, a quartet of entrepreneurs who have already harnessed exponential technology to build multibillion-dollar companies that forever changed the world: Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Page.

I've had the chance to work in varying degrees with each of these men. Elon Musk and Larry Page are both trustees and benefactors of the XPRIZE Foundation; Jeff Bezos ran the SEDS chapter at Princeton and has been passionate about opening space for the past forty years; and Richard Branson licensed the winning technology resulting from the Ansari XPRIZE to create Virgin Galactic. All four exemplify the central idea in this book, exhibiting a commitment to bold that's fierce, enduring, and masterfully executed.

Equally important, each of these entrepreneurs mastered a rarely discussed skill fundamental to bold pursuits and exponential entrepreneurship: the ability to think at scale. Exponential technology allows us to scale up like never before. Small groups can have huge impacts. A team of passionate innovators can alter the lives of a billion people in an eyeblink. To say that this kind of impact is unfathomable is putting it mildly.

Humans don't grok scale. Our brains evolved to process a simpler world, where everything we encountered was local and linear. Yet the four men described in this chapter have pushed through the limitations of linear thinking, and understanding their strategies for thinking at scale can help us do the same.

To get at those strategies, besides multiple conversations over years and in-person interviews with each, my research team combed through over two hundred hours of video footage of these men, breaking their ideas into categories and analyzing from there. In the end, we discovered that to think at scale, all four have leaned heavily on three of the psychological tools covered in earlier chapters—though, as we'll see in a moment, each in different and insightful ways—and, equally crucial, each relies on five additional mental strategies. While we'll get into greater detail in a moment, here's a complete list:

1. Risk taking and risk mitigation

2. Rapid iteration and ceaseless experimentation

3. Passion and purpose

4. Long-term thinking

5. Customer-centric thinking

6. Probabilistic thinking

7. Rationally optimistic thinking

8. Reliance on first principles, aka fundamental truths

Now, to see how these strategies work their magic, let's meet the first of our entrepreneurs, a man who reinvented banking before he turned thirty and then really got down to business.

In the early days of
Iron Man
, director Jon Favreau had a plausibility problem. His main protagonist, billionaire-genius-superhero Tony Stark, was larger than life. Too much larger than life. “I had no idea how to make him seem real,” Favreau told
Time
.
¹
“Then Robert Downey Jr. said, ‘We need to sit down with Elon Musk.' He was right.”

While Musk has yet to fabricate an Iron Man suit, he has revolutionized industries and built four multibillion-dollar companies: PayPal (banking), SpaceX (aerospace/defense), Tesla Motors (automotive), and SolarCities (power generation). As you might expect, with this kind of résumé, his passion for entrepreneurship emerged early.
²

Born in Pretoria, South Africa, Musk was programming computers by age nine. At twelve, he made five hundred dollars selling the code for a video game called Blastar. He entered college at seventeen, spending two years at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada, before transferring to Wharton to study business and physics. Next Musk moved on to Stanford to pursue his PhD in applied physics. That pursuit didn't last long. He left the program after just two days—itching to jump into the exploding world of the Internet.

“My initial goal wasn't to start a company,” he explains.
³
“I actually tried to get a job at Netscape—which seemed to be the only interesting Internet company at the time. I sent them my résumé, even hung out in the lobby, but I was too shy to talk to anyone and they never offered me a job. Eventually I said the hell with it, began coding myself, and started Zip2.”

Zip2 was an application that allowed companies to post content—maps, directory listings, etc.—online. Back then, this was a neat enough trick that Musk's start-up was bought by Compaq for $307 million—which was then the biggest sum ever paid for an Internet company. Musk cleared his first $28 million.
⁴

Next came X.com, an online financial services company that would eventually change its name to PayPal. Only three years later
PayPal was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in stock. Musk, the largest shareholder, walked away with his first $100 million.
⁵
Now the question was, what next?

“In early 2001, my old college roommate, Adeo Ressi, asked what I was going to do after PayPal. I remember telling him that there were certain things I thought were important for humanity's future—the Internet, sustainable energy, and space. At that time, after PayPal, I was very interested in space—which I believed was something clearly in the domain of governments—but that conversation with Adeo got me wondering when NASA was planning to send humans to Mars. I went looking, but couldn't find an answer on their website. At first I thought NASA just had a badly designed website. Why else couldn't you find this critical piece of information that would obviously be the first thing you'd want to know when you go to NASA.gov? But, it turned out, NASA had no plans for Mars. In fact, they had a crazy policy that didn't even let them talk about sending humans to Mars. Maybe, I thought, what was needed was a philanthropically funded mission to Mars to galvanize the world's attention. So I partnered with Adeo and we came up with two ideas. The first was to send a mouse on a one-way trip around Mars.”

Since it was too cruel to send a mouse on a suicide mission to Mars, they pursued their second idea: sending a greenhouse instead. The Mars Oasis project was born. The project's goal was to help increase NASA's budget for Mars exploration by galvanizing public interest. Their plan was straightforward: Send a small greenhouse, stocked with seeds and dehydrated nutrient gel, to the surface of the red planet. After landing, the gel would rehydrate the seeds, the seeds would germinate, and—by seeing a photograph of the resulting plants—the world would be spurred into action. “Imagine the money shot,” says Musk. “Green plants against a red Martian background.”

But when Musk started looking into buying a ride to Mars, he quickly learned that launch technology had gone downhill since Apollo—that was the beginning of his epiphany. “It changed the whole plan,” said Musk. “Unless something was done to reverse this degradation, a greenhouse on Mars wouldn't
matter.”